The Cultward Diaries: Edward
by MillieClann
Summary: An alternate view of the events of Cultward, from Edward's point of view. AU; Edward/Bella.
1. Chapter 1

I've been waiting to see who the Feds would send to us next, and last night I had an answer. We've been keeping an eye on the apartment that Jane used to visit, although her "Aunt Edna" seems to have vacated the place, and sure enough, today Roman brought word that a new girl had moved in. Young, he said. Ordinary looking.

Today I saw her-from a distance-and the whole world held its breath. I could feel my entire body reorient itself, as though nothing was more important than my awareness of her location. I forced myself to keep walking, to keep answering questions about the public lecture on string theory we'd just attended, but I wasn't paying attention. I was focused on her, reaching out to try to assess her reaction to the two who were trying to recruit her. It was all I could do to keep from running across to where she sat and begging her to come back to my apartment, where I could stand sentinel over her and keep her safe.

Except I can't.

I can't keep her safe. I don't even know how to keep my own people safe, except by increasing their awareness of the parallel worlds that surround us, and the possibility of incursion and distortion.

Even now, Alice says she can see storylines falling to ruins in the worlds we've been to: threads disrupted, pairings broken, happy endings thwarted and denied. I have no idea how much guilt I bear for all of that, if any. Being what we are, doing what we are able to do, may already in itself be a distortion of the way things are "meant to be." As soon as I understood that by entering a world, we blend with our in-world selves, I saw the danger. When we step out of worlds we have visited, that world's version of "us" leaves too. Just by crossing over, I have removed other Edwards from the storylines they were meant to inhabit. How can I ever recompense for the losses I have caused? How can I atone for that damage?

On Carlisle's advice we have all been limiting our travels, to try to do no harm. But the only answer, for all those girls left with no possibility of love, is to take this world's version there-if, that is, she even has the ability to cross-and, in so doing, remove her analogues. Blended with them, as I have blended with mine, we have only to be together to provide a happily-ever-after that will resonate through all the worlds.

There is, Rose reminded me, another possibility. Rose, in all the time I've known her, has hated and feared our abilities, and worried that we should have never crossed, never tried to enter any world other than this. She thinks we risk our very souls, in tampering with the lives-the storylines-assigned to us here on this earth. Sometimes she says bitterly that she wishes she had never learned about the other worlds; the least I can do, she says, is leave those heartbroken by my desertion in peace now. Perhaps the other-world girl of my dreams can find someone else, she said. Some other man, to make her happy. Leave her alone, and let her have her chance at normal happiness.

But the thought fills me with rage and despair. It cannot possibly be the right answer, can it? Not now, having seen her and felt myself falling already.

She must be mine. I would move heaven and earth-would spend my existence searching all the worlds; would shake reality until it released her-to have her at my side, through this lifetime and all eternity.

Is it wrong that I can't imagine life without her? Should I warn her away from me, though every fibre of my being longs to pull her close? At the end of the day, I cannot tell what I am meant to do. I have only my heart to guide me.

So I shall let her come to us, and make her own choice to explore our ideas or turn away. But I know my weaknesses. I am lonely. I want, more than anything, to have a wife to cherish and protect, to serve and to command. I want not to be alone anymore, wrestling with these questions of how to live with this strange ability to exit one reality and enter another. I want my soeur mystica, my angel in the house, my better self.

And now I have seen her. There is no going back.


	2. Chapter 2

Saturday

I awoke this morning vibrating with nervous excitement, as though it were Christmas Eve and I still a child. She will come to me; today she will come to me; the words sang through my mind.

When I stepped in to the auditorium to address the current crop of new students, there she was in front of the stage, waiting for me. Irrationally I hoped that perhaps she'd chosen that seat on purpose, unwilling to be an further from me than decorum demanded. Did she feel it too, I wondered? She looked pale with nervousness, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. If she shared my bed, she would sleep better, with me to watch over her...

I have set foot in alternate worlds that were so like our own that I could not find the point of divergence, worlds so similar to my home that I hunted in vain for the difference (knowing only that there must be one, for why else would the worlds exist if not to play out different storylines). Yet even in these most similar alternates, I knew that I was not home. There is a feeling of wrongness when you cross over. I know the others have experienced it too. Alice says that to her it is like hearing a familiar song played with just one note wrong: jarring and unsettling even if you are not consciously aware of what went wrong.

Being near Bella is the opposite of that. I could feel the rightness of it seeping through my skin, even at a distance, until I was soaked through with contentment and a kind of restful joy. If I had faith that Gd had not turned his back on me-if I only knew for certain that I had not transgressed unforgivably in stepping out of my world, that I had not forsaken my soul in blending with the other Edwards-I would have said that this was His way of communicating that I was making the right choice.

But every time I blended-every time I eliminated some other-Edward merely by stepping into his world so that the two of us became one person-was I reclaiming a piece of my soul, or committing a murder? Is what I did forgivable? Or have I extinguished men as worthy as I was, and made myself an eternal outcast?

I know Carlyle wrestles with these questions as well, but he has a consolation I do not: Esme was at his side when he travelled beyond our version of reality, so he never left some poor other-Esme bereft.

But it is evening now, and the setting of the sun always leaves me gloomy and prey to melancholy thoughts. This morning I was not in so bleak a mood. Seeing her sitting there, trying not to blush beneath the heat of my gaze, made me feel more alive and playful than I have in years. So when I reached that point in the lecture when I always broach the delicate subject of who leads in a relationship, and who follows-and how immutable that is for most people, and, more importantly, how for many people the only hint they will ever have comes through their reaction to fiction-I called her to the stage.

She came to me, as I had known she would, and when I kissed her I felt her melt into my arms, trembling and helpless and oh, so willing to be mine. She may not have known it, may not have had any clear understanding of her own reactions, but every response was a declaration of her readiness to yield to my intent: each delicate shiver of nervous excitement; the way her lips parted beneath mine; her body, pressing itself instinctively against the length of mine. When I lifted my head her eyes were still closed, and the pulse in her throat beat visibly, quickening my own heartbeat.

I cannot describe, even to myself, how it felt to hold her. It was like catching a scent on the wind, delicate yet impossibly delectable, and knowing it is the one food that can satiate your hunger. (A clumsy metaphor, that, but now I cannot help laughing at the possibility that somewhere, in one of the parallel universes, there is an Edward who chooses his Bella by scent.) The rightness of us together was undeniable. She opened her eyes, and I read the confusion there, and wished I could explain it all to her.

How insane would I sound, if I tried to tell her that again and again, in a fathomless number of worlds, she and I are meant to be together?

But later, when the students were absorbed in one of the endless bits of work we use to try to make them understand the way things really are, I started to hate myself for daring to pursue her.

If she stays close to us, it's only a matter of time before she finds a threshold and crosses over herself.

Whatever moral peril we have put ourselves in, my family and I, do I really want Bella to share in it? It's one thing that I may have jeopardized my own soul; it's a far, far worse one that now I am on the brink of drawing her in as well.

So I went to her, and brought her to my rooms, and stood there-nearly overwhelmed with the desire to pull her into my arms and lay full claim to her, body and soul-and tried to warn her away.

I only succeeded in confusing her further, I suspect, and from the expression on her face she has no intention of giving up so easily. She thinks we may suitable subjects for a federal investigation; how can I convince her that we're more dangerous than she can imagine?

We cross from one storyline to another, as easily as most people enter and leave buildings. We have found worlds that this world thinks are fiction; we have been to places so beautiful they could never be captured in worlds; we have been to places so dark, so evil, that I worry to this day that blending with the Edwards of those worlds has corrupted me in some fashion.

Whereas she still thinks stories are just that: stories. How can I bear to complicate her life with mine, cursed as it is?


End file.
